What Kind of Case Is a Case of a Ghost?

Avery Gordon, in her text Ghostly Matters, queries, “What kind of case is a case of a ghost?” She concludes, “It is often a case of inarticulate experiences, of symptoms and screen memories, of spiraling affects, of more than one story at a time.” The published reports of J. Marion Sims’ earliest vesico-vaginal fistula trials pose a similar interpretive challenge to present-day readers. The bodies of examined, long-deceased women reach us now through the spectral and explanatory magic of the printed text. But more than simply cases of women made ghosts by their haunting presence in the archive, Sims’ writings on the Montgomery, Alabama fistulaexperiments are also cases of women who are alternately there and not there. They force us to consider how that which we name as “an event” is always-already haunted insofar as it is produced by the multiple narratives which describe that event. It is precisely this overlay of narratives that this chapter aims to examine. Sims’ re-tellings of the story of his discovery of a surgical cure for fistula create an extended conceit that is necessarily self-referential and transhistorical. The texts speak to, revise and pre-figure each other as they depict the same moment of experimentation. This paper takes up the process of representation within which black women, through substitution and transposition, were made to literally embody a womanhood to which they were allowed severely limited access, if any at all. Indeed, it seeks to read the traces of black women’s foreclosed witness in Sims’ accounts. In confronting the multiple ways in which these women’s lives influenced medical knowledge and discourse, we may locate the afterimages of those moments of influence and interaction as they appear in the printed record even as we critique the bodily evidence these women were called to produce.